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Friday, February 4, 2011

This week our theme was "Laissez les bon temps rouler" as we wrapped up Week 20 of Adventures!

In history this week, we read about the Louisiana Purchase. We looked at this picture ...

... from this book that I picked up at the Friends of the Library book sale last year ...

... to see exactly how much land was purchased from France. Now, granted, it's a lot of land! (In fact, you can see by looking at the map in the first picture that it more than doubled the size of the country at the time.) Even so, I was shocked to learn that the purchase price was $15 million! I mean, that's a lot of money in 2011, but in 1803 ... geez Louise!!! But apparently it was actually a reasonable price for such a large piece of land, so Thomas Jefferson purchased it from Napoleon Bonaparte, who needed the money to buy warships because France was at war with England.

Here is the notebook page Hannah made for the Louisiana Purchase.

Her art skills leave a lot to be desired, but I thought the idea behind it was cute. The man on the chair is Napoleon Bonaparte. The other man is Thomas Jefferson, who is pulling a stack of money to give Bonaparte in exchange for the land.

We also learned that Louisiana was the next state to become part of our country.

The girls did a presentation on Louisiana at co-op last year, and they actually remembered a lot of information from it. In fact, Hannah asked if we could get out "that jazz guy's" CD and listen to it. (That'd be Louis Armstrong. During their presentation we listened to some of his music, as well as some of Wayne Toups'.)

Last year we looked at some common ingredients creoles and cajuns use to cook, but we didn't sample anything. But this time 'round, we did have some red beans and rice! I wasn't ambitious enough to cook it from scratch using the recipe in the teacher's manual, but I did happen to have a box of Tony Cachere's red beans and rice handy, so we made those instead!
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They were both willing to give this new dish a try ...

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... but neither of them liked it. Good thing we moved back to Texas before we had kids, huh?! :)

﻿We also read about the War of 1812 and how the events of that war inspired Francis Scott Key to write The Star-Spangled Banner.

In Bible, we looked at Jesus as the Vine. Our memory verse was John 15:5 ("I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."), but we also backed up a little and spent some time in John 15:1-2 ("I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.") I'm so glad we backed up and looked at the first two verses in that passage and took some time to meditate on what it might look like in our lives to be pruned, to have those ungodly habits or "diseased" ways of thinking removed from our lives so that in the end we can be more spiritually healthy and, as a result, produce more fruit for the Kingdom.

I don't think I've taken a picture of our Names of Jesus poster since the beginning of the year, so here's an updated shot of that.

Starting at the top and going clockwise, we have the Vine, the Light of the World, the Lamb of God, the Rock, the Way, the Living Water, Immanuel, and the Bread of Life.

Since our Bible focused on Jesus as the vine, our science had to do with plants. We conducted an experiment to see whether seeds need water to grow.

We put 10 popcorn kernels on a wet paper towel and 10 on a dry paper towel.

We covered both sets of kernels with foil and observed them every day.

By the last day, our dry kernels had not changed at all ...

... but our kernels with water had begun to grow.

And in music this week, we began studying another of Tchaikovsky's ballets, Swan Lake. I never imagined either my girls or myself getting so into the ballet study. We are thoroughly enjoying The Barefoot Book of Ballet Stories as a complement to our study.

I don't think I would ever "get" the story behind the music—even if I saw it performed as a ballet—without a book to kind of hold my hand as I went along!